


The Last Breath

by Zoadgo



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison is a vengeful spirit, Canonical Character Death, Comfort, F/M, out of control powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-09-30
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:09:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2382824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia's powers mature with a vengeance when she turns 18, allowing her to fully venture into the spirit realm. Unfortunately she doesn't know how to control it, and once you can see the spirits, they can see you...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Breath

Exhaustion pulls at Lydia’s shoulders, dragging her heavily into the driver’s seat of her car and making it a struggle for her to keep her hands from slipping off of the wheel. She glances at the glowing red of the clock on her dash, trying not to think about how it’s just a few shades brighter than the blood she’d been surrounded by just half an hour ago. 11:58 PM stands unwavering in her vision, and Lydia curses the existence of supernatural beings in general, and werewolves in specific, for the millionth time that night.

She trains her eyes back on the blessedly empty road in front of her, muttering swears that grow increasingly creative and loud. Her adrenal glands attempt to give her a proper rush with her rage, but all it manages after the night she’s had is a weak flutter of energy. It’s enough to make her sit up straight and strengthen her grip, though, so Lydia keeps ranting.

“Fucking werewolves and their goddamn _problems_. All the fucking time. _‘Lydia, we need someone to read Latin. Lydia, we need someone to speak to ghosts. Lydia, we need someone to help us with our damn math homework!’_ And then they have to scout out a new area of town, so of course bring along the banshee who doesn’t even know how to work her fucking powers! Never mind the fact that she’s been up since 4 AM translating _their_ bestiary into English. Never mind the fact that she’s frighteningly mortal. Never mind the fact that it’s her goddamn birthday tomorrow!” Her eyes fall on the clock again, and she corrects herself with a growl. “Today. Happy fucking birthday to me.”

The anger leaves Lydia in a rush, leaden limbs returning heavier than before and a sickening depression clutching at her heart. She’s 18 today, and this year she won’t have a party. It seemed so frivolous with everything that’s been going on with the pack and her own family. But 18 is supposed to be important, surely one of her friends would have at least thought to mention it, considering it was almost her birthday when they parted ways after the pack had neutralized the imps living in an abandoned warehouse. 

But no one sends her a text, even. She knows that she’s being silly, they’ll definitely wish her well in the morning and come over for movies and a hopefully normal night among friends, but adrenaline crashes and sleep deprivation wreak havoc on her emotions. Logically, she’s fine, but her mind has never been the best at controlling her heart, not when she’s alone. So Lydia begins to sniffle and cry lightly at her isolation, as the miles on her car climb and the minutes tick by.

Lydia is a genius by all accounts, but one thing she never bothered to fix was the clock in her car. She’s perfectly capable, but when you can do anything, why bother with something so insignificant? She knows it runs five minutes fast, and she uses her phone for time mostly anyway. So she turns 18 when her dashboard displays 12:05 AM, and that’s when Lydia runs her car into a field.

She’s completely unaware of her tires flinging soil and grass, or the trajectory the vehicle follows due to her harms jerking the steering wheel violently. She can’t hear the engine rev, or feel the tremors of uneven ground her car was never meant for. Because Lydia isn’t perceiving that world anymore, the world that she had always thought was the only one, the true one. Lydia’s eyes gaze out of the front windscreen and into another plane of existence as her car finally rattles her foot off of the accelerator and slows to a halt. 

The once dark and empty night is bright and full of creatures now. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere, a greenish tinge to it that makes Lydia feel slightly nauseous. She feels more than slightly nauseated when on of the creatures approaches her, and her mind makes sense of its form. What she had thought was some sort of animal or monster turns out to be so much worse.

“A-Allison?” Lydia’s voice sounds distant to her own ears, and the form in front of her doesn’t respond at all. It just stands there, chest heaving laboured breaths as it stares her down.

Lydia wants to look away, but she can’t. This thing in front of her looks like Allison, it has her body, but it isn’t her. Not anymore. Its flesh clings to bones unnaturally, and its eyes are deep pit of void that hold Lydia’s soul trapped in its gaze. It breathes heavier, air rasping in its throat until it turns into growls. Black spittle begins to trickle down its chin as a once familiar face bares teeth in a snarl. The Allison-creature starts to gnash its teeth, chomping at the air and letting out bestial noises, advancing on Lydia. She wants to move, to run, to scream, but she can’t.

Other creatures turn, revealing themselves to be humanoid as well. Some seem familiar, faces she’s seen in passing on the street or deaths she’s foretold. Their feral displays seem to encourage each other to roar louder, move quicker. Lydia has no idea what will happen when they reach her, but she feels with a sense that only she has that it will be bad. She tries to snap back to reality, but how can she do that when this seems so incredibly real? What is reality, truly?

Allison-beast is slow in its advancements, and possibly the most frightening. When it is standing directly in front of Lydia, far closer than she would like, it stops and so do all the others. There’s an astounding silence that stretches for eternities, even though Lydia knows she’s probably crying, just not in this world. The fear doesn’t abate with time, and Lydia still can’t figure out how to get out of there. She’s trying everything, pursuing every option she can think of. Her desperate attempts to control her presence in this realm distract her to the point that she doesn’t realize the movement of the creature, so slow as to be barely perceptible even if one was paying it full attention.

Then there is a mouth full of teeth, too many teeth, roaring in Lydia’s face. It stretches wider than humanly possible, a gaping maw that threatens to devour her whole. And Lydia is still stuck, her spirit about to be destroyed by some malevolent being that bears her friend’s form, and she still can’t leave, she’s going to die, she can’t even--

“Lydia!”

Air rushes painfully into Lydia’s lungs, as if she’d been holding her breath for far too long. She relishes the feeling, the sensation of having a body and controlling it. She flexes muscles, almost crying in relief when she’s able to move her hands. 

“Are you okay?” The voice that brought her back speaks again, and Lydia becomes aware of a hand on her arm, blessedly warm against frozen skin. She traces the stranger’s limb, following it up his arm, over a well defined shoulder, to a familiar face.

“Parrish?” She attempts to say, but her voice cracks and dies in her throat as if she’d slept with her mouth open and dried out her throat. She swallows a few times, scratching in her throat easing with every movement, and then tries again. “What are you doing here?”

Deputy Jordan Parrish lets out a light huff of air that’s halfway to a laugh with a relieved smile and removes his hand from her arm to gesture at the field around them, “I could ask you the same thing.”

Lydia looks around, astonished at how far away the road is. “I don’t-” She begins to speak, but cuts herself off with a piercing scream that’s still loud even without her banshee powers invoked as she sees ghastly forms coming back into focus, and they begin to see her.

“Lydia, what’s wrong?!” Parrish shouts, grabbing her shoulders, and the creatures disappear again, leaving Lydia with tears on her face and a racing heart. Panic is written clear on Parrish’s face and Lydia wants to tell him it’s nothing, to make him stop worrying, but she’s distracted by everything she can see all of a sudden. Because she doesn’t see just a Sheriff's deputy when she looks at Parrish anymore. She doesn’t even see a man.

Where his hands meet her skin, she sees ethereal flames skirting over her skin, the purest white almost blinding her with its intensity. But those tiny fragments of power are nothing compared to what she sees when she turns this new sense on the rest of him. Flames of ivory energy wrap around him, clinging to him and forming… well, they look like feathers. Feathers that form wings along his arms, spiritual plumage that burns into her vision in the most amazing way. She doesn’t want to look away from this other version of him, but it slowly dims as his speech breaks through her reverie once again.

“--have no idea what to do, please Lydia, tell me what’s happening.” His brow is creased with concern, and Lydia can still see the ghost of his birdlike form there, even as everything fades away to what she once thought was normalcy.

“I… I’m not quite sure what’s happening.” Lydia’s proud of the fact that her voice shakes only slightly, less than her body is tremoring. Parrish moves to remove his grip from her shoulders, but Lydia stops him with a shouted “No!”

Parrish’s eyes widen, but he remains in contact with her and Lydia sighs in relief. “Is there something…. supernatural going on?”

“Definitely.” Lydia’s laugh is bitter and weak as she replies and tries to understand what’s happening to her. “I don’t know what. One minute I’m fine, the next I’m in a field with my dead best friend trying to eat me, then I’m waking up from that with you here, then as soon as you stop touching me she’s there again, and then you’re a flaming bird.”

Creases form deep on Parrish’s forehead as his eyebrows draw together in confusion. Lydia can’t blame him, she’s just as confused, if not more so. She has no idea what’s happening, or how to stop it, and no idea how to figure it out. She doesn’t know what to do. She’s always the one with the answers, and now she doesn’t even know the right questions to ask. Shakes course through her body, growing more violent by the second as her thoughts turn inwards and become laden with despair.

“I’m a bird?” Lydia gives Parrish her best exasperated look. That’s what he’s most concerned about?

“Yes, a great big shiny bird.” When he looks down at his arms questioningly, Lydia sighs sharply, “Not now, of course.”

“But I was?” 

“Or there’s some version of you that always is. I don’t know.” Tears threaten to spill from her eyes at the last. Admitting she has no idea isn’t easy for her, especially not after the night she’s had. Lydia sniffs sharply and tells herself stubbornly she is done crying for the day.

“Okay.” Parrish’s voice is surprisingly soothing, as are his thumbs slowly stroking her shoulders. “It’ll all be okay. What should we do?”

Lydia can’t answer that. She doesn’t have a good response, again. So she just closes her eyes and shakes her head, hoping he’ll understand what she means. She can’t handle all this right now, she just wants to sleep and forget it all.

“Well, obviously I can’t stay in contact with you forever.” The noise that escapes Lydia is somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Of course he can’t, but she can’t deal with the alternative. “Hey, Lydia? I promise it’ll be okay. I’m going to try letting go of you very slowly, and I want you to focus on everything you see and feel right now, yeah? Try and prevent… whatever it is that terrifies you so much from returning.”

Lydia presses her lips together tightly and sets her jaw, giving him a shaky nod. She opens her eyes and tries to focus on the details. A slight crack on the windscreen, a blade of grass waving in the wind but somehow still clinging to the roof of her car, the flex of muscles as Parrish’s hands slowly move away from her, the texture of the black muscle shirt he’s wearing, the sound of growling-- Lydia’s heart rate spikes and she clutches at Parrish like a lifeline, which he may very well be at this point.

“I can’t do it, I just, I can’t, it’s--” Parrish cuts off Lydia’s ramblings by leaning in and hugging her, gently rubbing her back with a strong hand. She clings to him, fists bunching the fabric over his chest and burying her face in his neck.

“Alright, so new plan then. Until we can get this sorted out, we stay together. Did you have any plans for today? Thankfully it’s my day off.” Lydia’s astounded at how calm he’s being, but she shouldn’t have expected anything less. Nothing has ever seemed to seriously faze the deputy, not even when he’d found out there was a five million dollar hit on his head. 

“It’s my birthday… But I don’t think I’m feeling quite up for a party right now.” She lets out a shaky laugh and finds comfort in the rumbling of his chest as he hums understandingly.

“Alright then, first things first we both need some sleep. I just finished the evening shift and you could clearly use some rest.”

“Can we go to your place?” Lydia almost begs as soon as he mentions sleep. “It’s just that… I can’t do the whole family thing right now.”

“Okay, less people asking questions this way, too. I’m going to undo your seatbelt and we’re going to go to my car, okay? I’ll call a tow truck to get your car from there.”

With a safe plan and a warm embrace, Lydia rapidly finds it difficult to actually care about anything, or even to stay conscious. So she nods and leans back, allowing Parrish to do most of the work, just making sure she’s always in contact with him.With minimal difficulty they manage to navigate getting her out of her current vehicle and into a new one. When they’re both settled and buckled in, Lydia dozes lightly as Parrish talks on the phone, his hand securely clutching hers.

She must properly fall asleep at one point, because they’re moving along a back road when she opens her eyes. Trees lean towards the car and the shadows between them seem menacing and teeming with evil. Lydia pulls away from the window, leaning on Parrish’s arm and clinging to his hand more fiercely. 

“Awake so soon? I was expecting you to be out for the rest of the trip.” He doesn’t protest her contact with him, which Lydia is eternally grateful for.

“Sleep isn’t the easiest thing for me lately.” She stares at their hands, trying to focus on anything other than the darkness pressing in on the car. Logic tells her that the night is no more dangerous than the day, but something primal screams at her, begging her to be afraid to run for her life from the unknown.

“Because of your powers?” Lydia gives a positive hum as a response. “What exactly are you, anyway? All I know is that you’re definitely not a psychic.”

“I’m a banshee.” Lydia considers leaving it at that, but perhaps some conversation would help distract her. Even on a topic as macabre as her powers. “I can predict death, and on occasion commune with the dead. Maybe other things, but there’s not exactly an instruction manual for this stuff.”

“The wailing woman, huh? That explains the scream earlier.” Lydia winces sympathetically. Even without her powers, she still has an impressive set of lungs. “Do you want to maybe try and explain what’s been happening to you?”

“I can… try.” She doesn’t want to acknowledge it, but she can’t solve this on her own. Maybe she needs an external perspective. “I was driving, and then I wasn’t even here anymore. I was in a field, with all these creatures, and everything was… sort of green. But not a good green, green like infection and disease. Then one of the creatures came up to me and looked at me. It looked like A-” The name catches in Lydia’s throat, even after all this time. “Like Allison. But it was all wrong, like a twisted version of her. And then it started growling and coming at me, and then everything else was charging at me, and I swear she was going to eat me. Then suddenly I was back, with you calling my name.”

“So that’s the ‘dead best friend trying to kill me’ part. It is possible you were actually seeing her ghost?” Lydia doesn’t want to take his suggestion seriously, doesn’t want to consider that thing might actually be what has become of her friend, but she has to acknowledge that she doesn’t actually know.

“Maybe. I hope not.” Lydia absently traces the veins on the back of Parrish’s hand for a bit, wondering why it’s suddenly so easy to talk to him. Maybe it was seeing the other him, the version of him that was so incredibly pure. She can’t imagine him judging her for her intelligence, or her emotions, or her powers. “Hey, Parrish?”

“You can call me Jordan, Lydia, I’m pretty sure we’re less formal than that now.”

“Jordan. Have you figured out what you are yet?” Based on the energy surrounding him, Lydia has theories, but none she wants to practically test.

“Not yet. And I think I’m okay with that, you know?” Lydia shakes her head when he glances at her. How could he not want to know everything about his powers? “Without knowing what I am, what I’m _supposed_ to be, I’m free to just be… Well, me.”

“So… You think maybe knowing about our powers constrains their use?” Lydia chews on her lower lip, considering the possibility. It could be. After all, she’d never been able to use her powers when she’d been following the thought process of “I’m a banshee, I should be able to do this”. Maybe she should be more instinctual in her abilities. But instinct has never been her strongest suit.

“Maybe. But hey, what do I know?” He smiles comfortingly at Lydia. “I’m just a cop.”

Lydia doubts that Parrish - no, Jordan - has ever been _just_ a cop, and she’s about to say something when they pull into a gravel driveway. Suddenly all she can think about is laying down in a proper bed and actually sleeping, even if nightmares wake her after a few hours.

“It’s not much, but it’s safe at the very least.” Jordan opens his door and holds it as Lydia scrambles out through the driver’s side in order to avoid dropping his hand. She appraises his house, almost more of a cottage in size. At the moment, it seems more amazing than any mansion she’s ever seen or fantasized about, if it means she doesn’t have to face the beasts again.

As soon as they pass through the door, the feeling of ‘home’ wraps around Lydia, and the shadows seem benign for the first time in a long time. WIth only a few fumbles, the pair remove their shoes, neither thinking of dropping their held hands for a more convenient point of contact. Lydia follows Jordan up a set of stairs that creak warmly at their weight, and into a bedroom barely big enough for the bed in it. The sight of it warms Lydia, and she forgoes any attempts to prepare for sleep in favour of laying down and pulling Jordan down beside her.

She falls asleep in seconds with his arms holding her safe, and that night Lydia doesn’t have nightmares. But who knows what the daylight will bring.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this was a gift for [Jen](http://somethingbanshee.tumblr.com), my lovely French woman who had a birthday a while back and requested "something not The 100" with no other guidance, so this is what you get! There will quite likely be a second part if anyone desires it. The story wasn't supposed to stop here (hence the title not really fitting), but I wanted to give her something at least! 
> 
> Thanks to the ever-suspicious [coldsaturn](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) for editing even though she doesn't watch Teen Wolf! As always, I'd love to chat with you guys [on tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com)
> 
> And thanks in advance for commenting/viewing/leaving kudos <3


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